Here’s a quick update on the stats for bike share usage in Philadelphia as the system gets more and more popular. As mentioned in my previous post I’m collecting from the open data API every five minutes using Logstash and then getting interesting snapshots and time-series graphs from Kibana. Bike availability over time clearly shows how popular the […]

An exciting week for Philly. The City’s new bike share system was launched on Thursday, Indego, with an impressive 58 active stations and 13 more coming soon. The organization running the system, Bicycle Transit Systems, has partnered with the city to launch an open data API that developers can use to build apps and visualizations. So far, […]

Usually when I go to hackathons I’m frantically working all weekend building something. This weekend I was invited to be a judge at Code for Philly’s Hack for Democracy. The experience was very different since I had the opportunity to look at a hackathon from a completely new viewpoint. Teams hacked on open data and built visualizations and apps that […]

I was recently volunteering on a project to build a responsive webapp where we used standards to ensure compatibility with screen reader software. Everything was going well; all the necessary markup was in place as recommended on the WebAIM site. Field sets, labels and buttons ordered correctly. I turned on screen reader options and everything was read back […]

Just over a year ago I started a volunteer civic project with Code for Philly called UnlockPhilly at a Hackathon called Apps for Philly Transit. UnlockPhilly’s aim: to raise awareness of good and bad accessibility by mapping accessible stations, elevator outages and accessible venues in Philadelphia. This blog post reviews progress made so far and describes […]

The Unlockphilly project gained new team members, prototyped a number of exciting new features and won first prize at the recent Hack4Access Hackathon. The Hackathon provided a really unique opportunity for developers to pair up with subject matter experts and end users in the field of accessibility for people with disabilities. I personally felt very […]

In a previous post I wrote about Unlock Philadelphia; a web app we started developing at a transit hackathon to map accessibility in Philadelphia. Well, thanks to the app, and a few tweets about an abandoned elevator at 8th and Market Station, accessibility and civic hacking made the news this week. NBC10 reporter Vince Lattanzio noticed […]

In my previous post I talked about an app I worked on at a Hackathon that visualizes the accessibility of Philadelphia stations and services around them. After seeing how much open transit data is out there and being inspired by other open data mapping apps, including those by Chris Whong (in particular the Baltimore City Charm […]

Apps For Philly Transit is an annual Hackathon that “aims to bring together transportation organizations and citizens of Philadelphia to rapidly conceive, design, and prototype uses of open data relating to transportation in Philly”. I pitched an idea called Unlock Philadelphia: an application to help people with disabilities, parents with strollers and older people to […]

Open Data Nottingham has released traffic accident data covering incidents in Nottinghamshire for the last four years. For reported accidents, persons are listed (anonymously) if they suffer slight, severe or fatal injuries. Drivers are identified, along with age/gender, but only if they are injured. The quality and format of the data is good. Nottingham City’s website already […]